Abstract
AbstractAnthropogenic climate change and the necessary transformation of society to mitigate its consequences constitutes an unprecedented educational challenge. Responding to the climate emergency and to society’s awakening climate activism generates a complex situation for school leadership in particular. Here, we report findings from our research with climate activist students and teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand. We argue that school leadership plays a crucial role in enabling student and teacher agency and the development of effective Climate Change Education in schools. We utilise assemblage thinking, situating this within the new materialisms, to conceptualise schools and their leadership as dynamic assemblages, and we discuss teacher and student experiences as actors across such assemblages. We conclude that deterritorialisation and decoding of educational institutions and their leadership practices can promote and enable education to become a driver of the cultural transformation of society that the climate emergency mandates.
Highlights
Anthropogenic climate change is the most profound contemporary challenge for the future of humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems (Carter, 2019; IPCC, 2018; Ripple, Wolf, Newsome, Barnard & Moomaw, 2019; Schellnhuber et al, 2016; Steffen et al, 2018)
We argue that the climate emergency and the awakening of societal climate activism constitutes a context for school leadership that currently ranks somewhere between complex and chaotic on Gilbert’s (2015) interpretation of the Cynefin leadership framework developed by Snowden and Boone (2007)
It filters down to teachers and students and generates ‘disembodied learning’ (p. 83) and ‘disempowered students’ (p. 85). We argue that this neoliberal culture has set the scene for many of the difficulties of the education system to engage proactively with the cultural transformation required to maintain McNeil’s ‘dark optimism’ (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al, 2019, p. 278) in the light of the unimaginable disruptions heralded by the climate emergency
Summary
Anthropogenic climate change is the most profound contemporary challenge for the future of humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems (Carter, 2019; IPCC, 2018; Ripple, Wolf, Newsome, Barnard & Moomaw, 2019; Schellnhuber et al, 2016; Steffen et al, 2018). It injects urgency into the turn towards new materialist ontologies and the project of bridging the divide between discourse and materiality, the social and the natural sciences, and the interrogation of relationships of power and politics, with profound implications for education (Barad, 2007; Ellenzweig, 2017; Reid, 2019; Zembylas, 2017). Education is central to the generation as well as the reproduction of culture, social patterns and strata. Nash (1990) highlights Bourdieu’s thesis of schools as a culturally reproductive and ‘conservative force’ Education aids the reproduction of the dominant culture
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